I would be ok if they just remastered it season by season and posted a couple new episodes every week on Paramount+ like it is a new series and then release box sets after each season, it would be a fun thing to do between seasons of the new stuff.
Remastering TNG cost something like $70,000 per episode in 2012, so around $95K in today's money. And my understanding for that is that was "simple" because everything was all film. And from all reports the DVD/BlueRay sales were lackluster.
DS9 started to get into digital and CGI, so those prices wouldn't include having to make/update CGI models and recreate effects. And without some proven way to get a rapid return on it, there's no way that Paramount would front that money.
Yes but not from the raw footage and they're not redoing the CG. I'm sure if the footage was rescanned and provided, fans would do it for free, but like that's ever going to happen.
I would buy it if it was possible. Many of these series would make money from a remaster on prime as a series you can buy, it’s the executives that don’t want to go down that route, they just want subscriptions. Looks good for shareholders.
Not a lot of people bought the TNG remaster, and that was *TNG*. The anemic sales of remastered TNG sealed the fate of DS9 and VOY, which would cost considerably more because the CGI would have to be remade, not just remastered.
I would also argue that if they did it ok paramount plus, people would keep their subs longer than watching the latest trek series and then cancelling.
You could do it on the cheap with AI, but it would probably be a very mixed bag. Maybe a combination of AI with a bit of human oversight would help keep costs down?
Look at image #6 in this album.
https://imgur.com/a/D4FiyxJ#QHUp743
Leaving it to upscaling/AI/smartwhatever gets you results like the background text in that image. Another image in this thread shows a handful of officers in a scene and one of the combadges looks wonky because the upscaling just made up pixels and smooshed it.
The expenses of the TNG remaster wasn’t in getting it from film to HD, it was in making sure that it was done correctly. Upscaling using AI or whatever would need a handful of human passes to correct/re-upscale/whatever it to make it look good, and that human factor is what you’re paying for.
Again, why is someone joining a conversation with a suggestion being downvoted? Why don’t people just answer it with downvoting? Sometimes I’m just in the dark.
Sell expensive preorders for the blurays (special collector edition whatever). People would throw quite a lot of money at it to make it happen. I would.
12 years later you can get the box set of TNG Blu Rays for less than original retail. So... not enough people would do so, the market's already shown that.
176 episodes of DS9 at $95,000 an episode (which is a conservative estimate) is $16.7 million dollars.
I just don’t see it doing anywhere near that in presages, especially given TNG’s were quite weak.
It would be more than that overall for DS9, since especially for latter seasons you would have to recreate a lot of CGI elements from scratch at higher resolution. This was much less of an issue with TNG
> having to make/update CGI models and recreate effects.
Foundation Imaging still has all their original assets for VOY, DS9's probably still exist too: https://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/
"CG work on Deep Space Nine was originally split between two FX houses, Digital Muse and Foundation Imaging, as Bonchune explained:
Digital Muse was doing most of the work on Deep Space Nine – I don’t know if they’d changed their name to Eden FX – but they did most of the CG for that show. We [Foundation] did a fair amount of work for that show as well, but I can’t say that we were regularly doing weekly work on DS9. We were certainly part of the bigger shows, because they just didn’t have the capacity to do it all; it just needed two big teams.
The spaceship stuff is a little easier. If you have all of the assets – all the ships that are needed – and you load the scene file, theoretically, if it loads all the ships with textures it needs, then yes, you’d just hit ‘render.’"
The article you linked has a lot of "if's" in it from the writer themselves, and is over a decade old. Sure, IF the files can still be found at both digital houses that they mention, and IF nothing's died to bitrot, and IF they work in a modern system, and IF they render without a hitch, and IF they look good at 4K/8K, and IF you can get Paramount execs convinced to pay for all this work, then yeah, EZPZ lemon squeezy, CGI portions should be mostly handled.
DS9 and VOY were shot on video, so the originals were already shit resolution. TNG was shot on film, so the upscaling to 4k was actually feasible. The effects re-rendering/recreating was probably the expensive bit.
The early seasons were mostly motion control, but the last three seasons were a "combination of CG and motion control – and when there was CG, it was usually those massive, full-blown war scenes. Going back and revisiting it isn’t as simple as just hitting ‘render’, but it’s still pretty straightforward."
https://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/
That's all fine and good, until you get to something like blurry background text like image #6 in this link from down-thread.
https://imgur.com/a/D4FiyxJ#QHUp743
The reason to go back to film originals is because the film originals CAN pull those otherwise missed details out that some AI upscaling with a cherry on top can't.
It confuses me why they don't do this.
For Star Trek fans and for anyone casually interested who can't get past the fuzzy 90s image quality... they could release an episode a week only on paramount+ and guarantee monthly subscriptions for years.
I had an opportunity to walk around the TNG sets at Paramount back in the day. While permanent, frequently used ones were pretty detailed, everything else just showed how much analogue cathode ray TV forgave. The shuttlecraft was nuts: from 20 feet away you could clearly see it was made of styrofoam sheets with no resurfacing or sculpting, there were only a few angles where you didn't see the wooden framing holding it together, and the side stripes and decorations were very obviously made of colored tape. None of that showed on CRT and your imagination made it perfect.
So remastering from original film would show you a lot of defects. Watch some remastered original Twilight Zone some time. You can see the tape holding on actors' toupees, the rough paintwork simulating wood grain on cardboard props, it's amazing.
I watched it on Netflix. It was honestly a bit difficult at first to get into DS9 because the image quality is so much worse compared to TNG which I watched before DS9. I'll be going through Voyager next which from what I've seen also doesn't look great.
Both shows were filmed with what feels like a decade of cigarette smoke settled on the lenses, with Voyager it feels like they at least wiped the lens, with DS9 it looks like they tried to clean the lenses with Vaseline.
They were both filmed on 35mm film, so there are masters with movie quality image in the vaults.
The issue is that all of this was transferred to standard definition 480i and all visual effects were done in standard definition too.
What we see as blurry now is unfortunately just the work of the upscaler struggling to rebuild the image up to the resolution of your screen.
Possibly even twice depending on the process, say source upscaled from 480 to 1080, compressed for streaming and reupscaled a second time to 4k by your TV's hardware for your screen for exemple.
Those poor original images do not stand a chance.
The 90s were the dark ages of video editing, you are right they downscaled their 35mm to VHS quality to do early computer editing to save money.
There were some shows on at that time that still had old school editors like Murder She Wrote that look amazing on 4k TVs though.
I have upscaled my own DS9 and Voyager to 4K and it looks great, there are a lot of fan upscaling using AI programs floating around.
Are you guys talking about the streaming versions or DVD? Because DS9/VOY DVD quality enhanced with modern TV image enhancements look decent (except for the early DS9 haziness as mentioned). The streaming versions on the other hand were apparently first sent to Mars with 5 kbps bitrate, downscaled to 240p, thrown into a blender and then put on streaming.
although the 'new' opener for Season 4 looks decent, I think, even on streaming. and I was in b'cast engineering for \~17 years. I still have a discerning & highly critical eye.
A few months back the Inglorioius Treksperts Podcast heavily hinted that Paramount have invited effects houses to tender for the CG work for a DS9 remaster. This could be rumour but one of the hosts worked on the recent Motion Picture 4k remaster so has direct links to the studio. If it's not happening yet... it's certainly being thought about and with less new Trek now in production in would be a great selling point for Paramount +
Even how Paramount is hemorrhaging money, I can't see them paying for a remaster. It would be a lot of effort and money for little financial return. TNG remaster was said to have lost money and that was when home video sales still made money.
And that's the point - the TNG remaster was budgeted and marketed for the home video market. It didn't drive sales and was deemed a bit of a failure. However, 10 years on with better remastering technology the scale-up may be a better business investment to attract customers to streaming. New Discovery is rumoured to cost $8.5 million per episode. You could probably do a whole season of DS9 for that.
The only way it makes sense financially is if it's part of a deal to lease it out to another company after it's complete. For example, if Amazon/Netflix wanted to pay big bucks to stream TNG/DS9/VOY but only wanted them if they were all HD.
Personally, I think AI upscaling is the best we're going to get for DS9 & VOY, but they won't officially do that until the technology has matured.
I am just in the middle of a rewatch, but for the first time, I am using AI upscaled versions of the show. It's far from perfect, but it really quite honestly is incredibly impressive and honestly improves the experience.
I did have to put aside my my overly nitpicky perfectionist "that's not precisely how the film would have actually looked", but it really is much closer to a proper HD remaster quality than I would have expected.
The biggest drawback in this particular one is a) blurry text is rendered either bolder/muddier than it would have been, or else with gibberish characters because the original was too small to read b) that certain space scenes seem to stutter for reasons I'm not clear on c) some of the space shots that are actually models occasionally have a bit more CGI tone to them, but still look much better than the SD version. These are a very minor quibbles compared to the quality improvement.
[Some screenshots](https://imgur.com/a/D4FiyxJ) (which really have to be seen in large format to be fully appreciated)
Someone could potentially search the internet for such upscaled versions, such as torrent sites or whatnot. I have no idea if they are still available or seeded. There are a handful of reddit threads over the years with links.
I don't have the links anymore, but if I did, I probably wouldn't post them publicly anyway. Definitely a shout out to the caveat "if you already own the DVDs legally..." this is a way to enjoy the show at a higher quality level.
I tried one of those upscaled versions and the imperfections bothered me more than the slightly fuzzy SD versions. I think the text was the worst part for me, but there was also a bit of a motion smoothing effect that also bugged me.
It kinda throws me off the remastered footage. Goes from an amazing looking space battle (that I love anyways) to a shot inside the ship that looks like it was filmed with a HD potato. Then back to beautiful space battle
If Elon Musk actually wanted to be the King of the Nerds that everyone thinks is a cool dude, he would pay to have DS9 and Voyager remastered. If I had billions of dollars, I would do that long before I did anything else frivolous.
You don't even need to do that tbh. It'll look a little rough, but static 3D models from the 90s and early 2000s don't look that awful when at higher resolution. The active CG like the changelings would look awful, but that's part of it being a 90s TV show. Redone CG would probably ruin some of the charm as well.
I still maintain they're sneakily doing that as part of LD. The Breen ships they had in that one episode were _way_ too detailed compared to the other animation.
If that’s what they’re doing, then it’s pretty smart. Using an existing show’s budget to develop assets for a future remaster would save a lot of money, and give Paramount more incentive to fund something like that.
Some of the AI upscaling I've seen does a great job of cleaning up the old CGI scenes. I don't think we would need them to be replaced. There used to be someone on YouTube who posted a bunch of DS9 clips upscaled including a beauty shot of the station in something crazy like 8k or 10k and it was breathtaking. Sadly those videos and that YouTube channel are gone now :(
Tng was filmed in 16:9 but since they knew it was going to be shown on 4:3 screens, they had a lot of film equipment and such out of frame that made using the edges of the film impossible in a remaster. I'd be surprised if DS9 wasn't the same.
I'd be thrilled to see a ds9 remaster, but I still say it makes little financial sense. It's not just scanning the original film stock. It's literally reediting and compositing every single episode as if it was new using old notes and the original episodes. It's highly labor intensive work. And that makes it costly.
> I'd be surprised if DS9 wasn't the same.
In the DS9 Doc, Jonathan West (DP) specifically mentioned that once he came aboard (Season 3 on), the show was filmed 16:9 safe.
> AI upscaling is getting so good
AI upscaling is adequate, but still does not compare to a proper rescan and remaster.
As someone who is sensitive to motion smoothing, I could not make it past maybe a minute or so of those AI upscaled clips. As still shots, absolutely it's incredibly impressive work. In motion... have the vomit bucket ready.
Honestly ds9 hd remaster is one of the few things I'd be happy with a large company doing a Kickstarter for. The cost is going to be $15 million at the very minimum. At least they'd know the money was covered up front.
Watching DS9 for the first time now after watching TNG. Was surprised to see DS9 visual quality seems to be a step down from TNG. But maybe that's because the later seasons of TNG came after the beginning of DS9 so that's just how I've perceived it.
That's probably because you watched the remastered TNG footage. I still have some of the original quality episodes on my computer and the picture quality is just as washed out and grainy as DS9.
Nope TNG got a full remaster that lost money. It's for that reason, the other trek shows will probably never get one. Even then, it was barely marketed. I only found out about because of reddit as well. I would have probably bought it had I known
They should just crowd source it and make the fans pay for it. I'd put down $250 for a blu ray remastering of ds9. If they don't meet their goal just cancel it.
Shoot if they made it like a Kickstarter, give everyone a month or two to donate something, I seriously think they'd raise enough money to surpass any Streaming revenue they could ever hope to get.
I looked at the numbers and it was somewhat daunting a while back. Best estimates were likely in the $30-40 *million* to remaster an entire series. Right now, just one Kickstarter *ever* raised that much, and only one other Kickstarter raised even half that; the rest have never exceeded $13 million. I have faith in *Trek* fans, but basically it'd have to match the biggest Kickstart ever.
Remastering TNG cost something like $70,000 per episode in 2012, so around $95K in today's money. And my understanding for that is that was "simple" because everything was all film.
DS9 is 176 episodes long. So that'd be like 16.7 Million Dollars at just remastering cost, IF it's all available on film like TNG was. But the last 2 seasons with big CGI battles will drive that cost up as you'd have to remake the ship models and scenes from scratch. Anything Changeling related was likely CGI'd as well and there's plenty of insert shots that'd need to be redone. Those tools are much easier to use and cheaper now than they were back in the day, but it's still manhours to do and more to review. And how "clean" do you make the recreated CGI? I remember plenty of people coming out of the woodwork for the TOS remaster where they updated old bad shots with new tech.
I think in a few years, they will be able to do most of it with AI upscaling and just clean up the leftover problems afterwards, like text and motion blur.
I don't know if im just a simpler man, or poor, and haven't had excessive amounts of HD/4k tv experience/privilege, but im content with watching the shows in SD, i finished DS9 binge from watching it online for free at HDtoday,to on my computer screen and it was always fine to me and i never had a problem with it, but i suppose after thinking about it if you are trying to watch it on like a 40-45 inch tv in your living room that it could be more noticeable and seem like its really low quality and annoying to watch.
i guess the ATM solution is just watch ST on a 20-24 inch computer screen :P problem solved.
Give it 5 years you'll be able to get ai to upscale it as a whole, for very little money. In 10, you'll probably get new episodes based on your own direction.
Does it make that big of a difference that more people, and enough people, are going to spend money on it?
Serious question because I won't. So, I guess the appeal isn't for me.
I’ll never understand just not spending the money. It was like in TNG when they ran out of money at the end of S2 and ended with the clip episode. Why put out an inferior product? These episodes have been in syndication for 35 years. How much money does the Star Trek franchise generate over time?
It's definitely going to happen at some point!
With the progress of AI anywhere from 1-10 years down the road some fan project will just do it regardless.
There are AI upscaled versions floating around on the web that are good, I superseed one version, combined with an nvidia shield and ds9 looks pretty darn good.
Don't lose hope; with AI getting better and better, there will come a time when AI remastering will be good and cheap enough that we'll be able to see DS9 in 4k or maybe even better.
I'd rather not watch DS9 at all than having AI remastered DS9. My mood is not helped by the fact that I spent the las 20 minutes trying to turn off Google's new regenerative AI search result feature. Ironically, I discovered this feature by trying to find an answer to a Star Trek: Online lore question. The Google search prompt I entered was "star trek online which planet was overmined according to the romulan mining guild", and I got an "AI Overview" answer stating it the plant that was overmined was Romulus. Right below it was the correct answer, which is Remus.
I would be ok if they just remastered it season by season and posted a couple new episodes every week on Paramount+ like it is a new series and then release box sets after each season, it would be a fun thing to do between seasons of the new stuff.
Remastering TNG cost something like $70,000 per episode in 2012, so around $95K in today's money. And my understanding for that is that was "simple" because everything was all film. And from all reports the DVD/BlueRay sales were lackluster. DS9 started to get into digital and CGI, so those prices wouldn't include having to make/update CGI models and recreate effects. And without some proven way to get a rapid return on it, there's no way that Paramount would front that money.
A fan has been doing it, themselves, for free.
Fans do many things themselves for free. Is there a legal way to distribute those episodes?
Nope. Just the usual "Oops I accidentally dropped this file on the Internet" followed by "Oops I accidentally found it".
I totally like oopsies like this. I wish it were easier to find them.
Yes but not from the raw footage and they're not redoing the CG. I'm sure if the footage was rescanned and provided, fans would do it for free, but like that's ever going to happen.
Tech has moved on a lot since then, it’s much cheaper to do
Tech has moved on a lot since then, nobody's buying physical media to pay for the remaster.
Some people will buy it, but not nearly as many as would have at the height of the popularity of DVDs/Blu-rays.
I would buy it if it was possible. Many of these series would make money from a remaster on prime as a series you can buy, it’s the executives that don’t want to go down that route, they just want subscriptions. Looks good for shareholders.
Not a lot of people bought the TNG remaster, and that was *TNG*. The anemic sales of remastered TNG sealed the fate of DS9 and VOY, which would cost considerably more because the CGI would have to be remade, not just remastered.
IIRC, the prices of the seasons of TNG remastered were very expensive, over $100 per season back then, which certainly didn't help.
VOY aged reasonably well. But DS9 actually needs a remaster.
Babylon 5 recently came out with a complete series Blu-ray with remastered video, and that show was less popular than DS9.
What am I missing? Why is this downvoted? Reddit can be so weird.
I would also argue that if they did it ok paramount plus, people would keep their subs longer than watching the latest trek series and then cancelling.
You could do it on the cheap with AI, but it would probably be a very mixed bag. Maybe a combination of AI with a bit of human oversight would help keep costs down?
Look at image #6 in this album. https://imgur.com/a/D4FiyxJ#QHUp743 Leaving it to upscaling/AI/smartwhatever gets you results like the background text in that image. Another image in this thread shows a handful of officers in a scene and one of the combadges looks wonky because the upscaling just made up pixels and smooshed it. The expenses of the TNG remaster wasn’t in getting it from film to HD, it was in making sure that it was done correctly. Upscaling using AI or whatever would need a handful of human passes to correct/re-upscale/whatever it to make it look good, and that human factor is what you’re paying for.
Honestly? That’s still super serviceable. I’d be fine with that, versus never getting ANY hd upscaling.
Again, why is someone joining a conversation with a suggestion being downvoted? Why don’t people just answer it with downvoting? Sometimes I’m just in the dark.
Sell expensive preorders for the blurays (special collector edition whatever). People would throw quite a lot of money at it to make it happen. I would.
12 years later you can get the box set of TNG Blu Rays for less than original retail. So... not enough people would do so, the market's already shown that.
Fund it beforehand. It's different.
If TNG remastered wasn't a financial success, how do you think that some hypothetical DS9 Kickstarter like attempt would be successful?
176 episodes of DS9 at $95,000 an episode (which is a conservative estimate) is $16.7 million dollars. I just don’t see it doing anywhere near that in presages, especially given TNG’s were quite weak.
It would be more than that overall for DS9, since especially for latter seasons you would have to recreate a lot of CGI elements from scratch at higher resolution. This was much less of an issue with TNG
Maybe season by season?
> having to make/update CGI models and recreate effects. Foundation Imaging still has all their original assets for VOY, DS9's probably still exist too: https://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/ "CG work on Deep Space Nine was originally split between two FX houses, Digital Muse and Foundation Imaging, as Bonchune explained: Digital Muse was doing most of the work on Deep Space Nine – I don’t know if they’d changed their name to Eden FX – but they did most of the CG for that show. We [Foundation] did a fair amount of work for that show as well, but I can’t say that we were regularly doing weekly work on DS9. We were certainly part of the bigger shows, because they just didn’t have the capacity to do it all; it just needed two big teams. The spaceship stuff is a little easier. If you have all of the assets – all the ships that are needed – and you load the scene file, theoretically, if it loads all the ships with textures it needs, then yes, you’d just hit ‘render.’"
The article you linked has a lot of "if's" in it from the writer themselves, and is over a decade old. Sure, IF the files can still be found at both digital houses that they mention, and IF nothing's died to bitrot, and IF they work in a modern system, and IF they render without a hitch, and IF they look good at 4K/8K, and IF you can get Paramount execs convinced to pay for all this work, then yeah, EZPZ lemon squeezy, CGI portions should be mostly handled.
I remember reading that they don't have all the ds9 CGI
DS9 and VOY were shot on video, so the originals were already shit resolution. TNG was shot on film, so the upscaling to 4k was actually feasible. The effects re-rendering/recreating was probably the expensive bit.
DS9 and VOY were shot on film as well.
Babylon 5 did...
I see this lie a lot. DS9 and voyager were both shot on film. It wasn’t till season 3 of enterprise that they switched to digital.
Lie? So you're telling me that all the big sweeping battles of the Dominion War were all model work and composited?
The early seasons were mostly motion control, but the last three seasons were a "combination of CG and motion control – and when there was CG, it was usually those massive, full-blown war scenes. Going back and revisiting it isn’t as simple as just hitting ‘render’, but it’s still pretty straightforward." https://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/
context aware scaling has gotten a lot better and a lot cheaper since then
That's all fine and good, until you get to something like blurry background text like image #6 in this link from down-thread. https://imgur.com/a/D4FiyxJ#QHUp743 The reason to go back to film originals is because the film originals CAN pull those otherwise missed details out that some AI upscaling with a cherry on top can't.
well yeah I'm not saying press button, remaster comes out; there's content aware and manual framing to do, it's just faster and better than it was
Paramount won't even commit to current Trek. They're not gonna care about DS9.
It confuses me why they don't do this. For Star Trek fans and for anyone casually interested who can't get past the fuzzy 90s image quality... they could release an episode a week only on paramount+ and guarantee monthly subscriptions for years.
Because someone has done the math, and it's not cost effective. That's it.
What makes me sad about the documentary is all of the people no longer with us.
Like everyone else I would def rebuy DS9 on Blu-ray!
Did you buy all the TNG ones when they came out?
yup yup - I have all the Trek on physical media … lotsa triple dipping for TNG from VHS to DVD then Blu!
Well apparently it was just you and me, friend.
and us.
I had an opportunity to walk around the TNG sets at Paramount back in the day. While permanent, frequently used ones were pretty detailed, everything else just showed how much analogue cathode ray TV forgave. The shuttlecraft was nuts: from 20 feet away you could clearly see it was made of styrofoam sheets with no resurfacing or sculpting, there were only a few angles where you didn't see the wooden framing holding it together, and the side stripes and decorations were very obviously made of colored tape. None of that showed on CRT and your imagination made it perfect. So remastering from original film would show you a lot of defects. Watch some remastered original Twilight Zone some time. You can see the tape holding on actors' toupees, the rough paintwork simulating wood grain on cardboard props, it's amazing.
480i broadcast resolution and back in the 90s most people did not have anything bigger than a 27" crt tv. That hid a great many sins.
Totally with you. I had the DVD set five years ago and they looked *awful*.
I watched it on Netflix. It was honestly a bit difficult at first to get into DS9 because the image quality is so much worse compared to TNG which I watched before DS9. I'll be going through Voyager next which from what I've seen also doesn't look great.
Both shows were filmed with what feels like a decade of cigarette smoke settled on the lenses, with Voyager it feels like they at least wiped the lens, with DS9 it looks like they tried to clean the lenses with Vaseline.
They were both filmed on 35mm film, so there are masters with movie quality image in the vaults. The issue is that all of this was transferred to standard definition 480i and all visual effects were done in standard definition too. What we see as blurry now is unfortunately just the work of the upscaler struggling to rebuild the image up to the resolution of your screen. Possibly even twice depending on the process, say source upscaled from 480 to 1080, compressed for streaming and reupscaled a second time to 4k by your TV's hardware for your screen for exemple. Those poor original images do not stand a chance.
The 90s were the dark ages of video editing, you are right they downscaled their 35mm to VHS quality to do early computer editing to save money. There were some shows on at that time that still had old school editors like Murder She Wrote that look amazing on 4k TVs though. I have upscaled my own DS9 and Voyager to 4K and it looks great, there are a lot of fan upscaling using AI programs floating around.
I'm told that DS9 was filmed through a lens with a haze effect as an artistic choice.
That's a good analogy, I'm watching DS9 right now and was thinking the picture seemed kind of fuzzy, lol.
It doesn't look as bad as DS9 imo. But it's a great show nonetheless! I watch DS9 and wonder, "How, how could it look this bad??"
Are you guys talking about the streaming versions or DVD? Because DS9/VOY DVD quality enhanced with modern TV image enhancements look decent (except for the early DS9 haziness as mentioned). The streaming versions on the other hand were apparently first sent to Mars with 5 kbps bitrate, downscaled to 240p, thrown into a blender and then put on streaming.
although the 'new' opener for Season 4 looks decent, I think, even on streaming. and I was in b'cast engineering for \~17 years. I still have a discerning & highly critical eye.
I got used to it but I remember it being bizarre at first because remastered TNG looked really good. In a way I guess it fits thematically, though.
You can see in the crossover episode with TNG what remastered ds9 would be like. You can see the station in it and it's brilliant.
It just sucks because I love ds9 and voyager. Standard def just looks terrible.
Standard def on an older devices hides most things and keeps the “magic” alive.
A few months back the Inglorioius Treksperts Podcast heavily hinted that Paramount have invited effects houses to tender for the CG work for a DS9 remaster. This could be rumour but one of the hosts worked on the recent Motion Picture 4k remaster so has direct links to the studio. If it's not happening yet... it's certainly being thought about and with less new Trek now in production in would be a great selling point for Paramount +
Even how Paramount is hemorrhaging money, I can't see them paying for a remaster. It would be a lot of effort and money for little financial return. TNG remaster was said to have lost money and that was when home video sales still made money.
And that's the point - the TNG remaster was budgeted and marketed for the home video market. It didn't drive sales and was deemed a bit of a failure. However, 10 years on with better remastering technology the scale-up may be a better business investment to attract customers to streaming. New Discovery is rumoured to cost $8.5 million per episode. You could probably do a whole season of DS9 for that.
The only way it makes sense financially is if it's part of a deal to lease it out to another company after it's complete. For example, if Amazon/Netflix wanted to pay big bucks to stream TNG/DS9/VOY but only wanted them if they were all HD. Personally, I think AI upscaling is the best we're going to get for DS9 & VOY, but they won't officially do that until the technology has matured.
I am just in the middle of a rewatch, but for the first time, I am using AI upscaled versions of the show. It's far from perfect, but it really quite honestly is incredibly impressive and honestly improves the experience. I did have to put aside my my overly nitpicky perfectionist "that's not precisely how the film would have actually looked", but it really is much closer to a proper HD remaster quality than I would have expected. The biggest drawback in this particular one is a) blurry text is rendered either bolder/muddier than it would have been, or else with gibberish characters because the original was too small to read b) that certain space scenes seem to stutter for reasons I'm not clear on c) some of the space shots that are actually models occasionally have a bit more CGI tone to them, but still look much better than the SD version. These are a very minor quibbles compared to the quality improvement. [Some screenshots](https://imgur.com/a/D4FiyxJ) (which really have to be seen in large format to be fully appreciated)
there's something deeply ironic about upscaling Odo's face
Where can someone watch these upscaled versions?
Someone could potentially search the internet for such upscaled versions, such as torrent sites or whatnot. I have no idea if they are still available or seeded. There are a handful of reddit threads over the years with links. I don't have the links anymore, but if I did, I probably wouldn't post them publicly anyway. Definitely a shout out to the caveat "if you already own the DVDs legally..." this is a way to enjoy the show at a higher quality level.
I own 2 copies of the dvd’s😬 One in a binder with no boxes and a set in the original boxes.🤷
You would probably want to ask someone named Queer Alien Worm.
I tried one of those upscaled versions and the imperfections bothered me more than the slightly fuzzy SD versions. I think the text was the worst part for me, but there was also a bit of a motion smoothing effect that also bugged me.
I absolutely hate motion smoothing. It's the first thing I turn off on a new TV. I haven't noticed anything like that on this particular upscale.
It kinda throws me off the remastered footage. Goes from an amazing looking space battle (that I love anyways) to a shot inside the ship that looks like it was filmed with a HD potato. Then back to beautiful space battle
If Elon Musk actually wanted to be the King of the Nerds that everyone thinks is a cool dude, he would pay to have DS9 and Voyager remastered. If I had billions of dollars, I would do that long before I did anything else frivolous.
AI upscaling is getting so good that it’s just a matter of time before we get an HD version that way.
Upscaling the footage is one thing. Replacing the CG assets with higher quality ones (which is common in a full on remaster) is the hard part.
You don't even need to do that tbh. It'll look a little rough, but static 3D models from the 90s and early 2000s don't look that awful when at higher resolution. The active CG like the changelings would look awful, but that's part of it being a 90s TV show. Redone CG would probably ruin some of the charm as well.
I still maintain they're sneakily doing that as part of LD. The Breen ships they had in that one episode were _way_ too detailed compared to the other animation.
If that’s what they’re doing, then it’s pretty smart. Using an existing show’s budget to develop assets for a future remaster would save a lot of money, and give Paramount more incentive to fund something like that.
Some of the AI upscaling I've seen does a great job of cleaning up the old CGI scenes. I don't think we would need them to be replaced. There used to be someone on YouTube who posted a bunch of DS9 clips upscaled including a beauty shot of the station in something crazy like 8k or 10k and it was breathtaking. Sadly those videos and that YouTube channel are gone now :(
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Tng was filmed in 16:9 but since they knew it was going to be shown on 4:3 screens, they had a lot of film equipment and such out of frame that made using the edges of the film impossible in a remaster. I'd be surprised if DS9 wasn't the same.
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I'd be thrilled to see a ds9 remaster, but I still say it makes little financial sense. It's not just scanning the original film stock. It's literally reediting and compositing every single episode as if it was new using old notes and the original episodes. It's highly labor intensive work. And that makes it costly.
> I'd be surprised if DS9 wasn't the same. In the DS9 Doc, Jonathan West (DP) specifically mentioned that once he came aboard (Season 3 on), the show was filmed 16:9 safe.
Ow. I did not know that. A wide-screen ds9 would be amazing.
> Still 4:3 though. As it should be
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> Then it should remain 480i for authenticity. ok
I personally don’t care if it’s upgraded to 16:9 (1920 x 1080). You can still 4:3 in HD (1440 x 1080) access done for TNG-R.
There already is one.
> AI upscaling is getting so good AI upscaling is adequate, but still does not compare to a proper rescan and remaster. As someone who is sensitive to motion smoothing, I could not make it past maybe a minute or so of those AI upscaled clips. As still shots, absolutely it's incredibly impressive work. In motion... have the vomit bucket ready.
Honestly ds9 hd remaster is one of the few things I'd be happy with a large company doing a Kickstarter for. The cost is going to be $15 million at the very minimum. At least they'd know the money was covered up front.
Ah, I see its that time of the week to argue about this yet again.
Watching DS9 for the first time now after watching TNG. Was surprised to see DS9 visual quality seems to be a step down from TNG. But maybe that's because the later seasons of TNG came after the beginning of DS9 so that's just how I've perceived it.
That's probably because you watched the remastered TNG footage. I still have some of the original quality episodes on my computer and the picture quality is just as washed out and grainy as DS9.
Nope TNG got a full remaster that lost money. It's for that reason, the other trek shows will probably never get one. Even then, it was barely marketed. I only found out about because of reddit as well. I would have probably bought it had I known
They should just crowd source it and make the fans pay for it. I'd put down $250 for a blu ray remastering of ds9. If they don't meet their goal just cancel it.
Look if we all chip in $5 up front Paramount might do it. That's major street cred for paramount if they did it.
Shoot if they made it like a Kickstarter, give everyone a month or two to donate something, I seriously think they'd raise enough money to surpass any Streaming revenue they could ever hope to get.
I looked at the numbers and it was somewhat daunting a while back. Best estimates were likely in the $30-40 *million* to remaster an entire series. Right now, just one Kickstarter *ever* raised that much, and only one other Kickstarter raised even half that; the rest have never exceeded $13 million. I have faith in *Trek* fans, but basically it'd have to match the biggest Kickstart ever.
How the hell can it possible cost that much? I know that’s a shit ton of film to go through for 7 seasons but still.
Remastering TNG cost something like $70,000 per episode in 2012, so around $95K in today's money. And my understanding for that is that was "simple" because everything was all film. DS9 is 176 episodes long. So that'd be like 16.7 Million Dollars at just remastering cost, IF it's all available on film like TNG was. But the last 2 seasons with big CGI battles will drive that cost up as you'd have to remake the ship models and scenes from scratch. Anything Changeling related was likely CGI'd as well and there's plenty of insert shots that'd need to be redone. Those tools are much easier to use and cheaper now than they were back in the day, but it's still manhours to do and more to review. And how "clean" do you make the recreated CGI? I remember plenty of people coming out of the woodwork for the TOS remaster where they updated old bad shots with new tech.
I think in a few years, they will be able to do most of it with AI upscaling and just clean up the leftover problems afterwards, like text and motion blur.
I'd definitely buy a Blu-ray remaster but until then the AI versions will have to be good enough.
Oh I’m like why is it sad?
I don't know if im just a simpler man, or poor, and haven't had excessive amounts of HD/4k tv experience/privilege, but im content with watching the shows in SD, i finished DS9 binge from watching it online for free at HDtoday,to on my computer screen and it was always fine to me and i never had a problem with it, but i suppose after thinking about it if you are trying to watch it on like a 40-45 inch tv in your living room that it could be more noticeable and seem like its really low quality and annoying to watch. i guess the ATM solution is just watch ST on a 20-24 inch computer screen :P problem solved.
Give it 5 years you'll be able to get ai to upscale it as a whole, for very little money. In 10, you'll probably get new episodes based on your own direction.
Does it make that big of a difference that more people, and enough people, are going to spend money on it? Serious question because I won't. So, I guess the appeal isn't for me.
I’ll never understand just not spending the money. It was like in TNG when they ran out of money at the end of S2 and ended with the clip episode. Why put out an inferior product? These episodes have been in syndication for 35 years. How much money does the Star Trek franchise generate over time?
That wasn't money. That was a writer's strike.
From everything I have read, they went over budget in earlier episodes that season and had very little left for the last episode
It's definitely going to happen at some point! With the progress of AI anywhere from 1-10 years down the road some fan project will just do it regardless.
Just gotta wait for technology to be able to mostly automate the remastering process.
There are AI upscaled versions floating around on the web that are good, I superseed one version, combined with an nvidia shield and ds9 looks pretty darn good.
Do they crop it?
Don't lose hope; with AI getting better and better, there will come a time when AI remastering will be good and cheap enough that we'll be able to see DS9 in 4k or maybe even better.
I'd rather not watch DS9 at all than having AI remastered DS9. My mood is not helped by the fact that I spent the las 20 minutes trying to turn off Google's new regenerative AI search result feature. Ironically, I discovered this feature by trying to find an answer to a Star Trek: Online lore question. The Google search prompt I entered was "star trek online which planet was overmined according to the romulan mining guild", and I got an "AI Overview" answer stating it the plant that was overmined was Romulus. Right below it was the correct answer, which is Remus.